All posts tagged "Lazy Organic Gardener"

05/05/2011

A few weeks ago, the garden looked lush and wild and beautiful, but my enjoyment of it was dampened by the prospect of weeding and preparing for spring planting. Even sitting on the deck thinking about it tired me out.

I haven’t planted anything yet, but this weekend I will, and getting ready hasn’t been as tough as I anticipated. Because, well, the title says it all. This lazy gardener is eternally grateful for his garden beds and weed whacker.

I built the garden beds the winter before last. I loved the look of my garden, with its gentle curves and the way the cultivated areas were tucked in pockets amidst the wild. The yard is long and narrow, with the back forty (square feet, not acres) almost entirely wild, a sprawling and gnarled old plum tree surrounded by ivy growing on the fences, on the ground, and, until last weekend, up four or five of the tree’s main trunks.

I’ve got a plastic compost bin on one side and a metal shed covered entirely in ivy on the the other, and some piles of junk here and there, like stacks of terra cotta pots, and old hoses, which are mostly hidden by vegetation.

Here’s a photo of the southeastern corner of the yard.

But for the middle of the yard, where I get enough heat and sunshine to grow vegetables, keeping the wildness at bay has requires vigilance. (If I went away for five years, the entire garden, probably the house as well, would be smothered by morning glory and ivy.)

Over the years, I designed, and defined, the garden with a series of curves, anchored by a meandering flagstone walkway that bisects the garden. I used plastic bender board to set apart the cultivated areas, and put in some shorter paths with stepping stones, chunks of sidewalk concrete, or bricks.

You can see in the photos below how the tomatoes and the peppers behind them are integrated into the space between the pathway and the sprawling shrubs.

Because the natural world is full of curves, I hesitated introducing the hard geometry of rectangular planting beds. I was concerned I would lose that feeling of wildness. But every winter after the rains and every summer once I turned on the drip line to water the vegetables, I had to push the wild back to the edges and out of my vegetables. Which made it harder to be lazy.

Setting out the drip irrigation lines so they would feed my thirsty vegetables, which were somewhat randomly placed, created a spaghetti-like maze of black tubes with as many tentacles as a school of octopuses. The drip lines ended up watering the weeds as much as the food and flowers.

So the winter before last I built two 4 foot by 8 foot garden beds, a foot and a half high, out of scrap lumber and a few new redwood boards for the ledges around the top. And now that I’ve had them for a year and a half, I don’t know how I managed without them. When they were first completed, the right angles and the straight lines were a little stark amidst the curves and the wildness, but as you can see in the photos below, once the plants started growing, the beds fit right in, without damaging the organic undulation of the garden.

As for the weed whacker — I guess the generic term is string trimmer — let’s just say that after a couple hours one evening last week and another hour or so on the weekend, I was mostly done. My arms got tired and the string got tangled a few times, but the whole experience gave me more appreciation for why farmers use machines.

I still had to devote a couple hours to pulling the grass and weeds growing in the middle of the Peruvian lilies and lavatera, but that’s almost finished as well. You can see the difference between the two photos above. The top one, which looks a lot greener, was taken before the weed whacking, the bottom one afterward. (You can see the most evidence of the haircut in the background by the chairs. The garden might look better with all that green, but now that the rains have stopped, that green would be brown soon enough.)

Another indispensable tool is the broom — I gave the walkways a couple of passes with my sturdy outdoor broom. Then I sat down on the deck with an iced coffee and admired my work.

This weekend, I start planting. It should only take a half hour or so to clear the beds and set some seedlings in. Tomatoes, peppers, squash. Not sure what else. The drip hoses are already set up. I might be able to get it all done in a day or two, then I can be lazy for a few months and just watch my garden grow. Or so goes the theory.

04/21/2011

In honor of Earth Day, I'm recycling (and updating) some Lazy Organic Gardener tips from last spring. I put in four-plus hours weeding in the garden last weekend, and that was satisfying, but not very interesting to write about. For those five or six of you who've read these tips before — hi Mom — it's probably been long enough that you've forgotten most of them.

With spring upon us, I was recently asked for some tips for people getting started gardening. I hesitated — giving tips implies expertise, which I've never pretended to have — but I very much want to encourage people to garden, so here goes. In keeping with my "lazy" brand, however, I'm not promising any research or fact-checking here, nor will I refund your wasted time if the tips don't pan out. Caveat emtor and all that — note: that's the last Latin you're going to see from me. I'm not about look up scientific names of plants.

(If you already know you want to garden, you can jump down directly to the tips. But then you'll miss half the fun.)

Why I Garden

1. I like to be outside, doing physical work.

For someone who sits indoors in front of a computer for many hours every day, working with my hands outdoors gives me balance in my life. Walking, hiking, bicycling, running — for exercise, for pleasure, to get from one place to another — those activities are also a big part of my life, but I like being home, partly because I enjoy hanging out in my garden so much.

2. Gardening is meditative/therapeutic.

An hour in the garden might be frustrating now and then, and sometimes it's boring, but it always grounds me, keeps me sane. Sometimes I listen to music, or talk shows, or chat on the phone with my headset on. Just as often, I let my mind wander or percolate over whatever I'm grappling with. Like exercise, gardening almost always contributes at least a little to making my life better.

3. It keeps me tuned into the rhythm of the seasons, the lengths of the day, the angle of the sunlight.

We're now in the middle of "false spring" — fruit trees are exploding with blossoms and wildflowers and weeds are everywhere, but it's cool and the rainy season is still hanging on. Daylight savings has kicked in so, for the first time since fall, I have a block of daylight to garden after work. (Pulling weeds is a good way to decompress from the work day.)

4. It's an opportunity to be creative.

I've been a graphic designer for decades, but that's only two dimensions. Gardening has four, the usual three, plus the changes that come with the passage of time. There are a lot of elements to play with — color, shape, texture, smell, sound. (I don't have a bubbling fountain, but it's on my wish list.)

One of the designs I'm most pleased with is my curving flagstone path:

I have some garden art that I can move around — here's my pal Kokopelli playing a tune for the whimsical butterfly my sister gave me as a birthday present.

5. Food and flowers.

The only thing I'm harvesting these days is chard, kale, and lettuce I planted last fall, but soon there will be berries to pick and flowers to cut, and then later in the summer come the tomatoes, apples, squash, and so on. The two photos below are from last year in late May — the magenta flowers are lavatera and the orange and red ones are alstrameria, a.k.a., Peruvian lilies.

6. Replenishing the soil, giving back to the earth.

By applying compost, both from food waste and from the horse manure I get from Z's sister in Santa Cruz, I've been enriching the topsoil that the planet is losing at an alarming rate. It's part of the cycle of nature as much as the changing of the seasons. I’ve been amending the soil in my backyard for more than 20 years now.

7. Wildlife.

By keeping things organic and leaving more than half the yard somewhat wild, I attract a lot of critters. Hummingbirds, robins, and other birds. Butterflies, squirrels, lots of insects. Even an occasional raccoon.

8. Gardening builds community.

Gardening is something I share with my neighbors. While I grow most of my annuals in the backyard, which is where I get southern sun and shelter, I also have a small patch in the front, and I like working out there because it's more social. I'm surrounded by gardeners who are more serious than me, so I often end up with their leftovers. This year, for example, I may not need to buy tomato seedlings because one of my neighbors planted a few flats of seeds and won't have room for them all.

9. It's an opportunity to learn new things.

There are always new plants to grow. New designs to test. New chances to do things better. Last year, for example, I built garden beds, partly because things were getting too wild and the drip irrigation was getting too spaghetti-like. That made vegetable growing much easier.

10. Relaxation.

A garden is a great place to sit and veg out. It's an outdoor room, and, because I have a smallish house, my biggest room is my backyard, with its deck and garden. One of the best parts of gardening is not gardening — sitting and savoring what I've accomplished, or imagining what I'm going to do next. Here I am sitting on the ledge of my garden beds.

Ten Easy Tips on How to Get Started Gardening

1. Start small.

Fewer plants means less work. But get enough — at least a dozen or two — so if some fail to flourish, you won't be left with nothing.

2. Ask questions.

Go to a local nursery where there are people who know what grows well in your ecosystem and get a recommendation. Or better yet, ask the professional gardeners who frequent those nurseries. It will keep you from making silly mistakes. For example, where I live, in Berkeley, it's not hot enough to grow melons. I tried, and got one, the size of a tennis ball. But the Bay Area winter is perfect for greens like chard.

3. Get seedlings instead of seeds.

Some plants, like beans and zucchini, are easy to grow from seed, but starting with seedlings is easier.

4. Use garden soil and/or compost.

You can plant directly in the ground, but if you're starting anew, chances are the soil is less than ideal. Where I live, the clay soil is hard as a rock, though it's excellent once amended and loosened up with some digging and compost. (But that process took years.) Dig a hole, and fill it with the soil and compost. You can buy bags or truckloads of both, but there’s a lot available for free as well. Many horse stables will let you haul away horse manure. Some coffee shops will give spent grounds to anyone who’s willing to cart it away.

Of course, you can make your own compost too. I learned the intensive method, which involved chopping and layering and turning, but the pile-it-and-wait method works too.

5. Grow vegetables you love to eat.

In most parts of the country, tomatoes are the best bet. They're easy, prolific, and who doesn't love fresh tomatoes? Kale is easy, too, and I eat it, but it screams "healthy vegetable" more than "decadent pleasure."

6. Build your garden around easy plants.

Right now, in mid-April, my back yard is lush and green, and 90 percent of that is what I would characterize as “easy plants” that grow like weeds. (Of course, many of them are weeds.)

Trees and perennials form the foundation of my garden. I have seven fruit trees — pluots, apricot, apple, lemon, lime, and two plums — and raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries. All those are easy. And then there are shrubs like lavender and rosemary that smell lovely and take hardly any care.

My fences — chain link on one side and wooden on the other two — are completely invisible under ivy and morning glory. (Both invasive, a weed for many people, but they don’t take much work to cut back, and the morning glories are beautiful when they bloom.)

7. Grow natives.

Once established, they act like they belong there, and they will propagate themselves. A few years ago, I scattered California poppy seeds around my garden. Now, every year, around now, they pop up all over. Beauty without work.

8. Water regularly — every day or every other day when plants are young, two or three times a week once they get established.

I recommend a drip system with a timer, but that takes some upfront work to set, so you might want to put that off until later. If you do drip, the easiest is the soaker hose or the hose with emitters every six inches or so. You can set one of those up quickly. If don’t have drip and you're going to be away for a while and not able to water, you might try filing up wine bottles with water and turning them upside down quickly and pushing them into the soil. The water seeps into the soil gradually as the soil dries. Not as reliable as drip on a timer, but free and low-tech.

9. Get good gloves.

You can get the loose kind that fit all size hands, but I like the ones that fit more snugly, with a velcro strap to tighten them above my wrist. With gloves on, I almost feel like a real gardener.

10. Don't treat gardening like a chore.

Gardening can involve a lot of work, but you don't have to treat it like work. I work for a while, then rest. See #10 on the Why I Garden list. Sometimes at a logical stopping point, like when the green bin is full, I take a break.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a hurry to get something done, like get lettuce in early before it gets too hot, but then I say to myself, "There's always tomorrow. Or next year."

11. And here's one bonus tip, which gives me a chance to link to a memorable column that has nothing to do with gardening — Wear sunscreen.

04/08/2011

Even in my relatively balmy backyard in Berkeley, California, where I can garden year round, spring is as much a new beginning as it was when I started gardening in central Illinois, back when computers were the size of houses.

When I say it’s not easy being lazy in spring, I don’t mean that I haven’t succumbed to sitting on the deck and drinking a beer after a long day at work, savoring all that lush greenery without doing a damn thing. What’s hard is knowing that if I want to have a productive garden this year, I have to put the beer down and do some work. But the sitting is over.

But then, armchair gardening counts as work, too, right? I’ve got planting strategies to review, workplans to draft, priorities to set. I wouldn’t want to head into the wild jungle out there without a plan, would I?

You can see how wild and verdant my yard is. Rain plus sun plus lengthening days equals happiness. (For all those plants, not necessarily for the lazy gardener.)

Not so many flowers yet, except some white and pink blossoms on my spindly apple tree. Another month, and the Peruvian lilies (a.k.a. alstrameria) and lavatera will be bursting into flower, and will keep blooming for months. (Z said the other day that I should trim the lilies back, they were out of control, but I don’t know. She’ll sing a different tune when I bring her flowers every week.)

The drought is officially over. The reservoirs are full, the snowpack above normal. The state is still broke, but it’s got water in the bank for the first time in, well, you can look it up — I’ve got weeding to do.

Because, more than anything, most of that green is weeds and unwanted grass.

Ten years ago, I rid my yard of its pathetic lawn, but I can’t keep it from coming back every winter. With the Bay Area's long dry season from about April to November, grass only stays green for a month or so after the winter rains end and then looks ratty all summer long unless I water and tend it. But laziness and a well-maintained lawn do not go together, not even in the same sentence.

Over the past two years, I have found that as I garden I think about what I might write about later. It's almost as if gardening without reporting on it has become the proverbial tree falling in the empty forest. That’s what finally gets me out of my chair to pull weeds. There’s not much to write about just sitting on the deck.

But, before weeding, I reaped some of my winter bounty. The other evening, at dusk, I gathered up some chard, kale, arugula, and sorrel for a stir-fry. Those five minutes I meandered through garden with my orange-handled scissors and filled a white plastic colander with greens — that was the epitome of lazy gardening. After months of doing hardly any work, I was able to go out into my yard and harvest my dinner. Just add rice, onions, tofu, and some curry sauce. Nothing to write home about, but fresh from the garden, and who writes letters home these days anyway?

I planted the chard and kale last fall and harvested some of it over the winter — I just snipped off the leaves and the plant kept growing new ones. The sorrel comes back on its own every winter. I even transplanted it a few years ago, to a better spot, and it’s as prolific as ever. (It’s sour, so I only use a little. Which means I never run out.) The arugula grows wild in some spots, reseeding from last year’s plants, though hard to find amidst the weeds, and I now also have a perennial arugula plant, with small leaves shaped like sage.

If you’re starting to think that I haven’t talked about weeding yet because I haven’t done any, you’re mostly right. It’s overwhelming. Look at this spot here by the birdbath and apple tree. There’s a walkway under there somewhere. You can see a hint of the pink paving stones.

Even though I talk about mapping out my plan of action, the advantage of having so much to do is that I don't need a plan. I can walk out into the yard with gloves, clippers, and plastic bin, and pull up or clip whatever is in front of me. If I wander away from one spot to another because I want to be in the sun or I'm tired of kneeling on the flagstone, so be it.

While the ground is soft, I’m going to pull out as many of the weeds as I can by their roots, but I’ll probably give up before I’m finished and pull out the weed-whacker, the only machine I use in my garden. It’s noisy, heavy, and messy, and certainly not my image of the bucolic gentleman farmer, but it is more efficient and it’s especially good for clearing the flagstone walkway that curves through the garden. (The weed-whacker counts as organic. Takes only a few pennies worth of electricity from PG & E. You can look it up.)

Two winters ago, I built two 4’ x 8’ garden beds — you can read about that in Garden Beds, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 — and that will make this spring much easier. There are only a few weeds in the beds. One is full of fava beans that I planted to add nitrogen to the soil, and the other is full of lettuce, which has almost all bolted by now.

The favas produce an edible bean, though I tend not to eat it because it’s a lot of work to shell and peel the beans. I collect the seeds to sow the next winter. I heard recently that the leaves are edible too, but I’ve never tried them. Maybe this weekend. (There’s even a Facebook page for Growing Fava Beans for Edible Leaves and Greens. Who knew?)

I did pull some weeds the other night, around the apple tree. For maybe an hour. Filled up the blue bin three or four times, but didn’t make much of a dent. There are so many weeds left it almost makes me dread the weekend. Almost.

12/03/2010

Last month, on a drizzling Sunday afternoon in Berkeley, the Lazy Organic Gardener sat down with Mr. Green, Sierra's answer man, to talk about the new release of Rosalind Creasy's Edible Landscaping.

We had planned to talk in Mr. Green's garden, but the rain chased us into his makeshift greenhouse, where we sat across from each other, a table of thriving basil seedlings between us. (You can jump directly to the video here.)

First some introductions — can't tell the players without the program. Mr. Green is Sierra Magazine's Answer Guy, a.k.a. Bob Schildgen, who grew up on a Wisconsin farm, lives and gardens now in Berkeley, California, and was Sierra's managing editor for many years.

Here's Mr. Green in his garden in between the showers, and below that a couple more angles on the garden.

Author and gardener/landscaper Rosalind Creasy, from Los Altos, California, wrote the groundbreaking "Edible Landscaping" in 1982 and has spent the last 6 years thoroughly revising, updating, and adding new material (including scores of color photographs) to create a brand new edition for publication this fall. Schildgen contributed to the revised edition as an editor. (Creasy's book and her ideas were with us in Mr. Green's backyard, but she wasn't.)

The Lazy Organic Gardener — that's me — I'm trying to grow a pretty good garden without too much work, money, time, or water. I'm a friend and neighbor of Mr. Green. His backyard is a five minute walk from mine.

(Full disclosure: I have only browsed the book, which is pretty hefty. But I do have a dog-eared copy of Creasy's Cooking from the Garden, published in 1988, also by Sierra Club Books, and I've followed some of her gardening guidance as well as recipes.)

I brought my cheap little video camera with me and I've got a few clips below. Minimally edited, and only peripherally about Edible Landscaping. (I'm no more disciplined editing video than I am gardening.)

Since neither Mr. Green or I are formal gardeners by any yardstick, I started with the obvious question: "Edible Landscaping. The two-word title tells the story. Why does such a sensible idea need a book? Why isn't everybody already doing this?"

If you know Mr. Green, it won't surprise you that he answered this question with a three-part rant about the odiousness of lawns, though we eventually circled back to Creasy and her landscaping ideas.

"Lawns drive me crazy, especially when they stretch out for acre after boring acre," Mr. Green said, "My father used to hitch my brother and me to the lawnmower with wire around us to cut the grass. One time the grass got so high a mule team of two Schildgen boys couldn't cut it, so he borrowed a power mower. Well, an old harrow tooth the size of a railroad spike that my brother and I had left in the overgrown grass got caught by the lawn mower and destroyed the engine housing. My brother also almost lost his finger cleaning the mower."

(There was more invective about lawns, but you get the point.)

During World War II, Mr. Green said, the government encouraged "victory gardens" and American households and communities grew 40 percent of the nation's vegetables in home or community gardens. That practice dropped precipitously with postwar prosperity, and gardening tended more toward beauty than utility. Instead of growing squash and beans, gardeners grew flowers and grass lawns.

Over the years, lawns got bigger and bigger, and farmers wound up with power mowers that had more horsepower than some of their original tractors. Lawns were a symbol of wealth — vast expanses of green that didn't produce food or sustenance. Many farmers had backyard gardens, but the front was reserved for flowers and lawns.

It wasn't until Mr. Green grew up and visited Europe that he saw the kind of edible landscaping that Creasy is promoting.

Creasy's audience isn't really people like Mr. Green or the Lazy Organic Gardener, but folks whose priority for a garden is beauty.

Early in the season plants like tomatoes can look pretty, but once the fruit is ripening, they start looking bedraggled.

Like Mr. Green, I'm a proponent of Creasey's ideas, if not occasionally a practitioner. There is a difference between a gardener and landscaper, though I suppose I've done some landscaping too, since I've put in a flagstone pathway that winds through my garden. (It's not edible.)

Creasy is not a formal gardener, but she's way more on that end of the spectrum than I am. She values the aesthetics of a pleasing garden enough to put in the hours. I applaud her for that. Someday, I may have the time and motivation to follow her sage advice.

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